Anyone considered adding some of the paid features in community build

[samkawsarani]

I am a bit confused if this is supposed to be a local thing why is there a gated paid tier for an open source project. Has anyone tried adding the missing functionality like auto detect and auto export ?

[sujithatzackriya]

Hey @samkawsarani

First off, thank you for trying Meetily out and for caring enough to ask. This is a fair question from a user and a supporter, so I want to give you my honest take. It'll run long. Stick with me.

Maintaining Meetily isn't a side project for us. It's our full-time work, and that shapes everything below.

I think the confusion comes from a common mix-up. "Free" in open source gets read as "free of cost." But the "free" in FOSS is about freedom: the freedom to build on it, fork it, make it your own. That part isn't going anywhere. The core of Meetily is and will stay fully open-source and local-first. Recording, transcription, and note generation all run on your own machine, with no gating.

So why a paid tier? Because rent and food aren't free. This is our full-time job, and we have to cover our own needs to keep doing it. A handful of generous people pay for Pro, and that money is what lets us keep shipping to the open edition. Everything we add to OSS is funded by us covering our expenses through those subscriptions. It's a fairly standard open-core model: a small paid layer on top of conveniences (auto-detect, auto-export, sync, and the like) is what keeps the open core healthy and actively maintained instead of abandoned.

On scope: the community edition has all the core features, free. We aren't quietly moving everything behind a paywall. Pro has maybe two or three prominent features, aimed at professionals who can afford to support us.

Now, on the cost of features. When something gets contributed, it's on us to make sure it fits the product's standards and works cleanly with the rest. That's a real part of what keeps Meetily feeling like one product instead of a bunch of features bolted together. Often it means we spend weeks updating the core so a new feature lands properly. We keep a high bar, and we don't merge things just to say we have a feature. Here's the part people don't always see: you might spend a week building something that gets merged, but we then maintain it for the next five years. That's the real delta.

All that said, we're grateful for contributions, and some of our best features came from the community and are free for everyone. None of the paid stuff is meant to stop you from building those features in the open edition. The code is all here, and we genuinely welcome PRs for things like auto-detect and auto-export. If you want to contribute open implementations, we're happy to review and merge them. If you're interested in taking a crack at it, open an issue describing the approach and we'll help you scope it. The one thing we ask in return: keep the open versions independent of the paid backend, so they stay self-contained and local.

Every maintainer might see this a little differently, and that's fine. We can discuss and disagree. But I hope this gives you some clarity. Thanks again for asking. It's a good question.

[samkawsarani]

Fair callouts and this is not to take away from any of the work you guys do. I am a fan. I am all for gating some functionality. What I am struggling with is the SaaS model when the app runs locally or lets me hook up my own llm gateway.

I'd rather pay a one time fee. Thats what I have seen with apps like better dictation, clean shot etc that runs locally.

The SaaS models that do have oss usually have hosting and cloud services associated with it to justify the SaaS pricing. And that's where I am coming from.

If you tell me I can pay 50-60 per license or whatever amount for lifetime to get few extra stuff. I would do it in a heart beat.

[sujithatzackriya]

Feedback taken and shared with the team. We are exploring life time deals and how we could pull it off while making sure our existing paid customers also get the benefit of choosing us. So this is a great fedback. Thank you.

[Falci]

Another common practice in software that runs locally only is to charge a value for the life time use + 1 year of updates.
All new features and bug fixes released up to 1 year of the purchase is included, except if they are also part of free version, of course.
This way, if the team keep adding features, there's an incentive to purchase it again.